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Who we are

Who we are

Many groups recognize that our understanding of the functions and mechanisms of the nervous system will only advance through coordinated, global, scientific efforts. In June 2002, the Neuroinformatics Working Group for the Global Science Forum of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) recommended the establishment of an international organization to coordinate the application of the integrated methods of neuroinformatics. This recommendation was formally endorsed at the January 2004 OECD Science and Technology Ministerial, and led to the establishment of the International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility (INCF).

The INCF network serves as a forum to collaboratively coordinate global neuroinformatics activities that guide and oversee the development of standards, best practices, ontologies, and other unifying activities that fulfil the mission of INCF. We are member-governed: our global membership base are stakeholders and decision-makers of our activities, endorsements, funding opportunities, and all other functions.

The mission of INCF network is to promote the uptake of FAIR data management practices in neuroscience through the development of standards and best practices that support open, FAIR, and citable neuroscience. INCF also provides training on how standards and best practices facilitate reproducibility and enables the publishing of the entirety of research output, including data and code.

Attendees at Neuroinformatics 2018 in Montreal, Canada.

Neuroinformatics is a research field devoted to the development of neuroscience data and knowledge bases together with computational models and analytical tools for sharing, integration, and analysis of experimental data and advancement of theories about the nervous system function.

In the INCF context, neuroinformatics refers to scientific information about primary experimental data, ontology, metadata, analytical tools, and computational models of the nervous system. The primary data includes experiments and experimental conditions concerning the genomic, molecular, structural, cellular, networks, systems and behavioural level, in all species and preparations in both the normal and disordered states.

INCF Network

The INCF network comprises institutions, organizations, companies, and individuals active in neuroinformatics, neuroscience, data science, technology, and science policy and publishing.